Music performance anxiety. Substance use and career abandonment in Spanish music students

Abstract

This paper assesses the prevalence of substance use in Spanish music students as a strategy for coping with Musical Performance Anxiety (MPA). We also assess the relation between substance use and thoughts of abandoning one’s musical career in connection with the degree of self-reported MPA. We carried out this survey on a sample of 463 students studying different music specialties and enrolled in five superior music academies in Spain (mean age: 22.71 years). Among other questionnaires, all participants completed the Spanish version of the Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory and responded to a series of additional questions associated with MPA, substance use and thoughts of abandoning their musical career. Of those surveyed 33.9% indicated that at one point or another they had used substances in order to cope with MPA, and 19.0% had considered abandoning their musical studies. Those students who indicated that they had used substances to cope with MPA tended to have had more frequent thoughts of abandoning their musical career and suffered from a higher level of MPA than those who did not. A high percentage of music students who are attempting to cope with MPA also tend to adopt poorly adaptive strategies. These, in turn, lead to even greater levels of anxiety.

Music Self-Efficacy for Performance: An Explanatory Model Based on Social Support

“…Among the different proposals or theoretical models of stage anxiety, we chose to follow Barlow's (2000), as adapted to the musical context by Kenny et al (2004). This model differentiates between specific contextual factors, biological factors, and general environmental factors, whereby its interaction with other individual variables is responsible for developing catastrophic interpretations of reality, to a greater or lesser extent (Zarza et al, 2016;Orejudo et al, 2018). Without pursuing it as a main objective, we analyzed the possible relationship between the two constructs of musical self-efficacy and MPA, attempting to determine if elevated perceptions of musical self-efficacy are able to mediate on the achievement of success by decreasing anxiety levels.…”

Social Support as a Facilitator of Musical Self-Efficacy

“…This is confirmed by the revealed existence of feedback between selfefficacy and study habits from the onset. It is also well-known that a poor management of performance anxiety becomes a risk factor under which music students might either cease to make academic progress or abandon their studies and their career altogether (Orejudo et al, 2018). At the moment when the student embarks on university-level studies, a poor handling of stage fright will have new consequences (Casanova et al, 2018).…”

A zenei teljesítményszorongás: prevalencia, kialakulás, társuló zavarok és személyiségvonások, kezelési lehetőségek

“…Több kutatási eredmény is alátámasztja, hogy a zenei teljesítményszorongás tünetei növelik a kiégés kockázatát (Bernhard, 2010), hosszútávon pedig a fellépések elkerüléséhez vezetnek (González, Blanco-Piñeiro, & Díaz-Pereira, 2017). Egy spanyol vizsgálatban a megkérdezett zenészek 19%-a már gondolkodott azon, hogy erős szorongása miatt talán jobb lenne, ha elhagyná a zenei pályát (Orejudo, Zarza-Alzugaray, & Casanova, 2018).…”